Nope, no straw men, because I’m saying that the F-35’s level of stealth won’t even be very useful in 2030, forget about 2070. In the technological arms race of stealth vs advanced sensor networks, the ground based sensor networks have a fundamental advantage. They can be upgraded relatively easily / cheaply every 5-10 years. Meanwhile the F-35 airframes have to last for 50 years. It’s an economic war of attrition which stealth planes simply can’t win in the long term.
And yes with the current rate of progress on AI and autonomous vehicles I think mostly autonomous drones will be feasible by 2030, which will make all human piloted planes obsolete in warfare. A human will still be involved in the loop making key decisions, but the plane will do the rest. Fifteen years is a long time, just compare tech in 2001 to now and think how far we’ve come in AI / self driving cars / robotics in general.
The F-22 and F-35 both took roughly 15 years from prototype to real warfighting platform. That means such a capability wouldn’t be fielded before 2040, which in my terms is “not in the near future.”
How is a human going to communicate with a drone in a contested EW environment?
The catch with your reasoning is that historically it doesn’t hold up. You sound a lot like the people proclaiming the irrelevancy of the MBT in the 1960s-1970s due to the advent of the ATGM. Guess what- that wasn’t true at all.
Like EVERY arms race, both sides evolve; I suspect in the case of your ADA networks, we’ll see more intelligent anti-radiation missiles, as well as better/different EW suites. Also, the F-35 stealth capability may not be “effective” in 2030 in terms of enabling it to make it to the target undetected, but it’s entirely likely that it’ll be adequate for making the F-35 not unduly observable relative to the rest of the aircraft out there.
And finally, as for upgrading the ADA networks every 5-10 years, who does that? Nobody out there, save maybe the US can afford to actually do it on that schedule.
You don’t need to replace the entire radar or whatever, you just plugin in a new processor module with newer software. Everything I have read about stealth and from what I understand from my career in image processing is that taking a low resolution signal and making it good enough for a “kill chain” is just throwing more parallel CPUs and better algorithms at it. Combine that with sensor fusion which is again just software and networking, not all new hardware and you get a sensor network that can take the low resolution signal and turn it into one good enough for a lock on.
Fundamentally you cannot make a 10 ton mass of metal moving through the air at 900 km plus, which is constantly spewing out heat behind it invisible.
Reply to the content of my message. My argument is that advances in software processing of imaging signals and sensor fusion will make F-35 level stealth mostly useless long before the predicted lifetime of the airframes. Dismissing this just makes you look ignorant, or like a shill for Lockheed Martin.
Ok…I have to ask, if you think that stealth’s utility is marginal, why do you suppose both China and Russia are developing stealth fighters of their own? If the F-35 is so useless, why has China gone to such lengths to steal and attempt to reverse engineer the thing? I mean, they are the ones who supposedly have this stealth busting tech…why would they bother even developing stealth fighters if they knew that their tech already or will soon trump it?? Or are you saying that THEY can develop it, but the US with it’s paltry military budget won’t be able to figure it out ourselves?
To me, your assertions that stealth is a chimera just flies in the face of reality. I mean, we could get into a highly technical discussion about stealth if you want (we’ve actually done this discussion in the past which someone who thought stealth was a boondoggle…can’t recall who it was or what the thread was now, but it was a fairly lengthy discussion), but just look at it logically. If Russia and/or China has already supposedly cracked stealth, or even if they actually THINK they are on the path to do so, why are they bothering developing their own 5th gen stealth fighters? Why waste the money on them, when they could simply develop the other attributes of a 5th gen fighter instead, and make it better?? And why are other countries lining up to buy F-35s (or developing their own stealth air craft, such as Japan and, IIRC, the Europeans)?? I mean, unless you are positing that you know something that literally all those other countries don’t, how does it make logical sense to you that they are doing this, when they could either buy current 4.5 gen fighters or develop their own 5th gen fighters simply without the stealth??
Even putting aside stealth for a moment, at what way is an F-16 better than an F-35? I think about the only thing the F-16 has going for it is in sustained turning engagements (which itself is typically a death sentence if there are wingmen present) , and slightly better speed/acceleration when its in clean configuration (no weapons, external fuel tanks, pods, etc)
With a typical combat load, the F-35 has:
much greater Angle-of-Attack, and “noise pointing” performance
better acceleration
a higher top speed
much longer combat range
better radar
larger maximum payload
Here’s a recent quote from a norwegian pilot interview on F-35 vs F-16 performance: